Traveling in Style : FANTASY LAKE : Fish It, Swim It, Cruise It or Just Look at It--However You Approach It, Lake Mead May Be America’s Most Eccentric Body of Water

WHEN THE WIND KICKS UP AT LAKE MEAD Marina, The End seems near. Everything trembles and rocks. Whitecaps rip the crystalline water, mallards and gulls bob crazily on the surface, boats clonk against their moorings. Sightseers, trying to feed popcorn to the carp that crowd the sides of the dock, hold onto their hats with one hand while the popcorn they proffer is whisked from their outstretched fingers by the wind and flies back over their shoulders. This wind, fierce and ancient, is the same wind that helped cut the Grand Canyon.

This lake is not a lake at all, but a reservoir--a chain of deep desert canyons filled relatively recently with water, stretching along and up from Nevada’s southeastern border. In its own way, Lake Mead is as artificial as the billion-dollar megahotels of Las Vegas, 23 miles to the northwest. Only 58 years old, the lake was born after Hoover Dam (also known as Boulder Dam) was completed in 1935. Although now considered the granddaddy of what environmentalists disparagingly call the “cash register dams” (designed to make money, with little concern for their effect on its surroundings), Hoover Dam was conceived originally as a flood-control project, to prevent the Colorado River’s periodic inundation of California’s Imperial Valley. The need for such a dam became dramatically apparent when two years of flooding devastated California farmlands early in the century, leaving behind the Salton Sea as a calling card. Construction began only when it became clear that a dam project could support itself through the sale of water and hydroelectric power to a growing Los Angeles. If L.A. didn’t exist, Hoover Dam wouldn’t either.

The dam is widely considered to be one of the world’s great marvels of civil engineering--and the people who live around Lake Mead are patently proud of it. They memorize its statistics as if it were a beloved hometown ball team. The girl who sells me a soft pretzel at the Lake Mead Marina is able to tell me the dam’s height (726 feet) and how thick it is (“about two football fields, I think. End to end.”). She also reminds me that there is enough concrete in the dam to build an 18-foot-wide highway from San Francisco to New York.

Locals are also proud of the fact that Hoover Dam, built during the Depression oh so many low-tech years ago, was nonetheless completed ahead of schedule and under budget.

If a justifiable fuss is made over Hoover Dam, relatively little is said about Lake Mead. It’s impressive. Twice the size of Rhode Island and shaped roughly like a three-armed starfish, the lake has 550 miles of jagged shoreline extending from Hoover Dam in the west to the Grand Wash Cliffs in the east, where the Grand Canyon National Park begins. It’s the largest man-made lake on the continent. Yet to many of its 8 million annual visitors, Lake Mead is simply a handy recreation area, a place to boat, fish and waterski off-season--Tahoe with better weather.

Indeed, the opportunities for recreation are more varied here than you might imagine. Sailors and windsurfers savor the desert wind, while anglers claim that Lake Mead has some of the best sports fishing in the country. Largemouth bass, rainbow trout, channel catfish, bluegill, even the prized striped bass are popular and plentiful catches here. Scuba divers and snorkelers are attracted to Lake Mead, too. “It’s as if someone filled up the Grand Canyon with water,” one local diving enthusiast tells me. “The rock formations down there are incredible.” Canoers, hikers, campers, wildflower lovers and amateur geologists all find plenty to do, too.

Still, there’s more to this place than the “Recreation Bonanza” advertised in the tourist brochures. If Lake Mead is as artificial as Las Vegas, it’s also as improbable, and sometimes nearly as bizarre. In a way, it’s an outdoor equivalent of that great indoor fantasyland.

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THE FIRST THING YOU SHOULD REMEMBER about Lake Mead is that despite its semi-pastoral surroundings it’s right in the middle of the desert. People never quite seem to believe that--just like they never quite understand why, when they drop a net full of beer and soda over the side of their rented boat, the drinks come up warmer rather than cooler. That’s because the water in Lake Mead maintains an average daytime temperature of 86 degrees in the dead of summer.

At least they have the right idea with the boats. The only way to see a lot of Lake Mead is by water. This is literally true, since Nevada’s Highway 167, also called the Northshore Scenic Drive, veers away from the coastline after 20 miles or so, and there are no roads at all along the south side.

If you don’t have a vessel of your own, you can pay $12, as I did, for a 90-minute cruise on the Desert Princess, a white Mississippi River paddle-wheeler berthed at the Lake Mead Marina. As the Desert Princess chugs toward Hoover Dam, a taped narrative is broadcast over the loudspeaker. Periodically, the roar of passing powerboats blots out the tape. But sitting behind me on the upper deck, three couples from South Dakota seem more intrigued by their cocktails--”Hoover Movers,” made of vodka, triple sec and peach schnapps--than by the recorded account of the goings-on around here during the Paleozoic Era.

To the port side of the paddle-wheeler we pass a mossy rock, no bigger than a football, marked with a white buoy. Rocks appear and disappear with no warning here, giving boaters fits. The amount of water in the lake is determined not by the size of the nearby snowpack, as it would be in a real lake, but solely by the water needs of Southern California. If rainfall is low in Riverside, for example, so is the lake. If rainfall is plentiful, the lake is high, because no water is released. When no water is released, no electricity is generated--and Boulder City has to buy its power elsewhere. Oh, and occasionally the level of the lake will shrink imperceptibly because a town downstream has phoned in and asked for a few more inches of water to hold a powerboat race.

A U.S. Park Service ranger is on board the Desert Princess. I tell her I’m writing about Lake Mead and ask what is the largest misconception people have about the reservoir. “Misconception?” she replies, her smile dropping as her voice rises.

“You know,” I continue. “What do people imagine about Lake Mead that turns out not to be true.”

“I can’t answer that, legally,” she says. “We’re not supposed to. You’ll have to call our public affairs person.” Then she turns her back on me.

I tap her on the shoulder. “Are people surprised by the extreme heat of the desert?” I persist. “Is the lake bigger than they thought?”

“You’ll have to ask public affairs.”

I ask the South Dakotans instead. On the basis of their expectations, I’d say that the biggest misconception people have about Lake Mead is that the view of Hoover Dam from the lake will take their breath away. But when it reveals itself at last, this great engineering marvel looks like nothing so much as a cinder-block wall--the kind that might run behind an urban gas station.

It’s the other side of the dam, the outer shell--the great, curving concrete wall--that most people think of when they imagine its magnificence. There are two good ways to get this view: One is by taking the Hoover Dam Tour, which sends you down through the center of the dam--726 feet, remember--and out onto one of the powerhouse wings on either side of the canyon. The tour is not for claustrophobes; it even says so on a sign in the ticket window. They mash as many people as possible into the elevators, which take a full two minutes to descend to the base of the dam. Other than some immense green generators, I have no recollection of what I saw on the tour. I am a claustrophobe, didn’t notice the warning sign and spent the duration of the tour sweating in anticipation of the elevator ride back up.

A less nerve-racking way to see the dam from the outside is by a motor-driven raft trip, which can be organized through a company in Boulder City (see Guidebook). The tour originates in a lagoon at the base of the dam, about 500 feet below the lake, and proceeds 14 miles downstream through Black Canyon to Willow Beach in Lake Mojave. This is another local incongruity: Hoover/Boulder Dam is not in Boulder Canyon but in neighboring Black Canyon. The name, it seems, had already been decided on when geologists recommended the latter canyon for the dam site.

Another name that doesn’t quite work is that of the river. The Spanish called it colorado , or “colored red,” for its red silt. Wags of yore used to describe the river as being “too thick to drink and too thin to plow.” Today, it’s emerald green, colored only by minerals and algae. The silt is caught behind the dam, in Lake Mead; in time, it will color the whole lake red, and eventually fill it up.

Knowing this doesn’t diminish the pleasure of our raft trip, at least while we’re on the water. The day is warm, not hot, and the wind is at our backs. The occasional spray of water that splashes us is cold. We spy some bighorn sheep on shore and red-tailed hawks and cormorants overhead. Hazy green stands of tamarisk trees huddle near the shoreline. As we drift downriver, we pass the mouths of serpentine little canyons that shelter hot springs, a favorite destination of canoe enthusiasts, and house-size boulders hurled across the canyon by some flash flood during the last Ice Age. Miles-long slabs of rock wall block the sun, their singed look--a 1,000-year-old patina of iron, clay and manganese--gives Black Canyon its name. (The Piutes who once lived here pecked at the varnish, exposing the red rocks beneath, creating the pictographs we now call petroglyphs.)

On the Nevada side of the canyon, there is a gauging station that was used during the construction of Hoover Dam for measuring the Colorado’s water level and flow rate. A dam worker lived here in solitude, measuring the river twice a day from a cable car suspended between the walls of the canyon, then creeping home to his waterfront cabin along a catwalk nailed into the sheer rock. The catwalk is made from L-shaped pieces of rebar, the ribbed steel rods used in reinforced concrete, with pine planks laid end to end across them. We all gazed up at it, agreeing that it must have been a punishing way to live. Our guide turns off the engine. We sway in the current, listening for a moment to the water stirring beneath the raft.

“I don’t know,” says a man from Detroit, breaking the near-silence. “It doesn’t seem so bad to me. Do you think they get cable down here?”

GUIDEBOOK

Lake Mead by Dam

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Prices: Hotel prices are for a double room for one night. Restaurant prices are for dinner for two, food only.

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Getting there: Numerous carriers offer frequent daily air service to Las Vegas from the Los Angeles area. Among these are Southwest, America West, Delta, American and USAir from LAX, Burbank and Ontario, and American, Delta and America West from Orange County. Lake Mead is a 30-mile drive from Las Vegas’ McCarran Airport and approximately 300 miles from Los Angeles--a drive of about 6 1/2 hours.

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Where to stay: Lake Mead Resort Lodge, 322 Lakeshore Road, Boulder City, (702) 293-2074, fax 293-7017; reservations (800) 752-9669. Simple but comfortable rooms, many with lake views. Rates: $50-$65. Gold Strike Inn & Casino, Highway 93, Boulder City, (702) 293-5000; reservations (800) 245-6380. Straightforward accommodations, with casino gambling adjacent. Rates: $19-$29. Best Western Lighthouse Inn, 110 Ville Drive, Boulder City, (702) 293-6444, fax 293-6547; reservations (800) 528-1234. Clean and basic, with large rooms, about half of them with lake views. Rates: $58-$68. For a list of local campsites, call the Lake Mead Recreation Area at (702) 293-8906.

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Where to eat: Gold Strike Steak House at Gold Strike Inn (see above). No-nonsense meals, American-Continental in style;$30, with lunch and dinner buffets for $4.95 per person. Toto’s Mexican, 806 Buchanan Blvd., Boulder City, (702) 293-1744. Despite its strip-mall locale, this is authentic Mexican food for a great price; $25. Two Gals, 1632 Nevada Highway, Boulder City, (702) 293-1793. Omelettes, muffins, healthy sandwiches; $20.

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Tours and cruises: Expedition Depot, 1297 Nevada Highway, Boulder City, Nev. 89005; (702) 293-3776. It offers raft tours of Black Canyon ($64.95 per person) and tours of the nearby Grand Canyon by plane ($94 per person). Lake Mead Marina, (702) 293-3484, rents boats and water skis and is the departure point for the Desert Princess ($12 for adults, $5 for children). For cruise reservations and information, (702) 293-6180. Hoover Dam, Highway 93, east of Boulder City, (702) 293-8367. Tours daily between 8 a.m. and 6:30 p.m. Admission, $3 for adults, $1.50 for senior citizens, children under 12 free.

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For more information: National Park Service, Lake Mead Recreation Area, (702) 293-8926.